Claudia Brücken’s video for “Everyone Says Hi”

I was half-watching the 2014 movie, A Most Wanted Man, which is mostly noted as being the actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s last, when Hoffman’s character walks into a bar and “Everyone Says Hi” is playing. Except it isn’t Bowie’s version from the 2002 album, Heathen. A female voice was singing. So I looked it up and the voice belonged to Claudia Brücken, a German singer and sometimes member of the band, Propaganda. Brücken Is a big deal in Germany and released this video in support of her 2012 album, The Lost Are Found, on which “Everyone Says Hi” appears.

The blurb attached to the video explains that “Everyone Says Hi” fit with the theme of Brücken’s album of “melancholy but inspirational” songs. Another theme of the album, is that the songs, all of which are covers, are “lost” songs, which is to say lesser known songs from the artists she was covering.

The video is interesting. The images seem to better go along with the storyline of “Spaces Oddity,” complete with an astronaut who drifts away into space at the end. I think this is Brücken‘s way of connecting the song to Bowie while revealing that despite its sweet sound, that the song is really about loss and death.

Brücken, by the way is not the main actress in the video who looks like Anne Hathaway, but the blonde singer who pops in near the end.